Mapping Food and Health Premises in Barcelona. an Approach to Logics of Distribution and Proximity of Essential Urban Services
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International Journal of Geo-Information Article Mapping Food and Health Premises in Barcelona. An Approach to Logics of Distribution and Proximity of Essential Urban Services Carles Crosas and Eulàlia Gómez-Escoda * Barcelona Urbanism Laboratory, 08028 Barcelona, Spain; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Received: 2 November 2020; Accepted: 11 December 2020; Published: 13 December 2020 Abstract: The research analyzes the image of Barcelona and compares differences in quantity, variety and proximity of some essential services in diverse urban fragments. Focusing on food and health premises as critical universal services, series of maps provide overviews on the intensity of use to which each service is subjected, latent logics of their physical proximity and performance in regular urban fabrics due to the combination of activities and population distribution. The research uses a methodological approach and parameterization of the minimum daily urban mixture to highlight the uniqueness of the case of Barcelona, distinguished by the compactness of the urban fabric and the contiguity of activities, and to describe an extensive characterization of areas that from this perspective can be considered hyper-served or under-served. This investigation aims to contribute to the understanding of the necessity of the urban mixture and to provide clues about the distribution of services and activities. Keywords: urban mixture; urban activities; commerce; essential services; Barcelona 1. Introduction This article analyses the distribution of essential services in Barcelona with the aim of highlighting the value of minimum mixes of daily activities. The investigation is influenced by the anomalous operation of the city during the lockdown: on 14 March 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Spanish government decreed a national lockdown in which only essential services were allowed to continue operating: food stores, pharmacies and health facilities were, during a period of eight weeks, some of the few blinds that were raised at ground level in the city. The new “stay at home” routine radically changed urban performance with an unseen reduction of mobility and a radical switch of the social network to the digital scene. It was a syncopated global phenomenon: within a few weeks, cities worldwide readapted their everyday life following unexpected patterns to reduce the pandemic’s spread. The lockdown revealed the qualities and deficiencies in the distribution of essential services in relation to the density of the residential population, often masked by forced daily mobility, and transferred to neighborhoods a domestic role at the urban sphere. According to mobile phone data [1], Barcelona switched from hosting 2,337,104 people on 13 March 2020 to 1,634,957 two days after. Once most of the workplaces had closed, the urban debate during the lockdown focused on households and streets: some features of the housing stock were questioned as the sole daily scene for the majority of citizens, in terms of size [2], as common working places [3] and emphasizing the value of the users in their wise adaptation [4] making the most of any outdoor contact spaces such as window lintels and balconies. In addition, the drastic reduction of 77% of vehicle movements [5] highlighted the unprecedented quality of air (both in terms of pollution and visibility) and an explosion of greenery in the city. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2020, 9, 746; doi:10.3390/ijgi9120746 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2020, 9, 746 2 of 25 In the locked-down city [6–8], closeness became an appreciated asset because it ensured universal and safe supply: it minimized time away from home and facilitated access to basic products. In a new urban scenario characterized by empty streets, the layout of commerce became as much or even more important than in the active city itself, because it turned the “additional value” that commerce represents into “essential value” in the exceptional context. Beyond the exceptional context, urban proximity has become an important concept in the urban agenda for a more livable city, with on-trend concepts such as the “15-min city” [9,10]. Proximity has been the key to many other paradigms over the history of urbanism. The concept focuses on setting the conditions to cope with all needs for everyday life in the closest areas to citizens’ households. Proximity guarantees shorter trips and promotes non-motorized transportation, reducing pollution and congestion problems; it creates a more democratic urban space, diminishing the social differences caused by diverse access to transport; it makes all the facilities in the city equally available to all kinds of people, and ends up producing equal and socially sustainable travelling patterns [11]. 2. Materials and Methods The research deciphers the rationale for establishing minimum services all over Barcelona and discusses their relation to population and distances. The investigation produces thematic maps that relate some of the minimum services with population density and urban geography. All the figures are based on maps detailing urban subplots that represent built volumes inside a plot in the format of a shapefile geospatial vector data file (SHP) [12]. The following paragraphs describe the urban planning and design manuals and georeferenced databases that have been used to draw up some basic layers that describe the number of inhabitants, the population density and the minimum essential services that are considered for this research. Calculation methods and a first description of the base maps are described below. 2.1. Materials and Methods to Calculate Population This research has only taken as a measure for calculations resident population figures, disregarding journeys and floating population data for two reasons. On the one hand, available data based on mobile phones only consider journeys at distances of a minimum of 10 km for Barcelona [13], so they do not include mobility between neighborhoods and districts of the city. This fact could distort the results (as does not considering them at all). On the other hand, in the event that the description of essentiality had been limited to exceptional situations such as lockdown, during the 2020 lockdown forced mobility was residual: according to the results of the Covid-19 Survey in Barcelona [14] it is estimated that more than 70% of the active population of the city telecommuted during the lockdown period. Additionally, around 30% of the population worked in services that were considered essential, including food, pharmacy, health, transportation, security and the media. This radical decrease in daily mobility would come to draw a kind of accidental simplification of the aforementioned “15-min city” [1,9,10]. Two different sources were used for the population. The Municipal Population Register records a total of 1,666,530 inhabitants in 2020 and geolocates the population disaggregating the information at block level [15]. For densities, the last version of the Statistical Yearbook of Catalonia disaggregates information at the Nomenclature of Territorial Units (between 150,000 and 800,000 average population size, NUTS3) level, through an SHP data file with referenced population count in a 62.5 62.5 m × dynamic grid. The most recent publication sets an amount of 1,608,746 inhabitants in 2016 [16]. The difference in total number between both databases has been considered irrelevant for the purposes of the calculations of this research. 2.2. Methods to Calculate Distances and Proximity In recent times, the disciplinary debate on how to reduce daily traffic has been reinforced. The aim is to design self-sufficient mixed neighborhoods where it should be possible to live, work and have ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2020, 9, 746 3 of 25 basic services without major journeys. The discussion on urban communities and the local and nearby scale of the city has been quite present in Barcelona, where some urban polices were addressed “to become a self-sufficient city of productive neighborhoods at human speed, inside a hyper-connected zero-emissions Metropolitan Area” [17]. Regarding proximity, some authors have paid special attention to the relevance of micro-journeys in everyday metropolitan performance. Short trips are considered those that take less than a 10-min walk, which represents in Barcelona 23% of the total mobility performed by citizens between 16 and 64 years old [18]. According to the same research based on Everyday Mobility Inquiry [19] data, proximity trips are 64.4% of total trips for shopping purposes, whereas in the total amount of daily trips, proximity trips represent only 22.9%. Other interesting references specifically analyzed walking behavior for shopping purposes in other metropolitan areas [20,21]. From the perspective of daily trips, mobility enquiries such as EMQ06 take as a representative a 5- and 10-min walk, according to the aforementioned references and other sources (open source platforms [22,23] can be equivalent to a range between 330 and 400 m (5 min) and 650 and 800 m (10 min). This research takes the threshold of 400 m in the consideration of proximity distances due to the relationship that this measure establishes with the urban form of Barcelona. The grid plan designed by Ildefonso Cerdà in 1859, to modernize the city once the walls had been demolished, chose an inter-distance between blocks of 133 m, so that the sum of three blocks coincides with these 400 m. Years later, between 1930 and 1935, the Macià Plan designed by the modern architecture group GATCPAC would take the distance of three Cerdà blocks as the basic structure of its proposal for the city. Inherited from this are the bridges that cross Gran Via, west of Glòries Square, every 400 m and the piers that interrupt the coastline, also every 400 m. In the most contemporary context, the 3 3 block × matrix is at the origin of the superblocks project [24,25].